I want to take a longbow to the overwatch community

Overwatch is an incredible game. The design is gorgeous at almost every level. The characters are interesting despite this being essentially nothing more than a multiplayer arena shooter. The balance is for the most part pretty good, and it’s easily the best at what it does on the market, a market that was a wasteland because nobody else wanted to compete with Team Fortress 2. It’s a good game.

It’s just a shame that it is inherently a team shooter. In other words, you are necessarily at the mercy of the five other fuckers the matchmaking groups you with. And in quick play, two of these five other fuckers are invariably fucking snipers.

Why? Why the fuck? The snipers aren’t even good! They’re useful in a handful of situations, and useless in most others, and the fuckwits who pick them never get this. And of course, if you pick both of them, your team is woefully unbalanced and pretty fucking terrible. You cannot reasonably make up for that. You can’t build around that. One sniper, okay. But both? Ugh. So you just lose. And this keeps fucking happening. Over and over and over. Apparently these people enjoy that. I have no idea why. When my team loses, and I know that I sucked, I don’t like that. It’s not fun for me. Subjective opinions and whatnot, but I’m trying to put myself in the headspace of the kind of person for which that is fun, and am immediately reminded of the kind of bell-end who goes to a public minecraft server and immediately destroys everything in site. The kind of person I would like to spend some time alone with. In a large, open space. With a sniper rifle. Or give me an assault rifle and them a sniper rifle, because these fuckers can’t hit anything. Oh yeah, these snipers are balanced around the idea that the person playing them is a really good sniper player. If you’re just an average shot, playing sniper is a huge waste of time, and you’ll be no fucking use to your team.

And it just isn’t fun. I like playing tanks and supports. These are characters that, overwhelmingly, require a team to work with them. I love Winston, but if nobody leaps in behind me, I’m just an monkey full of bullets. I love supports, but if nobody is willing to keep the Genji off me, I’m just going to die a lot. I could pick another DPS character, but if I do that, what we end up with is the disturbingly common case where we have no tanks or supports and thus get run the fuck over, because the game is balanced around having a team that works together, rather than a bunch of sperglords who can’t figure out that you have to work together to kill the gatling gun turret hidden behind the big-ass shield, rather than run in one by one and die.

So thank you, fuckos. Thank you for ensuring that this excellent game is absolutely no fucking fun for me. I hope you get carpal tunnel and your computers catch fire. :mad:

Yeah. The game hasn’t attracted me because I rarely have time to commit to a team. I mostly solo’ed City of Heroes for that reason… but when a good team rolled up, it was the next thing to crack. More than once we kept playing extra hours when the high was there, and I have some truly treasured moments.

But a bad team - won’t detail for a long-dead game, but you know. Makes you want to delete the game files.

Is that the longbow bow and arrow or the Longbow Hellfire Missile?

I’ve never understood the appeal of doing pickup play in a multiplayer game centered around tightly knit teams, and it astounds me that games like that are so popular. Overwatch sounds like it would be an interesting game, but I’m not willing to schedule and coordinate time for it, or to keep dealing with badly formed teams of kids that won’t coordinate.

Eh, I occasionally see the same in Pathfinder games.

Show up with my Dwarf Cleric (buffing combat tank) and there’s 5 other players whose characters can’t do melee, they all need range. I don’t mind, it is my job to stand there, insult people and make them attack the steel clad Dwarf, but it does tend to be messy for the other players when some of the bad guys decide they should attack them and NOT me.

Of course, I’ve been on the other side of it too. In 4E D&D at a couple of sessions we’d faced flying opponents without a single ranged weapon and only one guy with offensive spells.

Luck of the draw really.

And that is why I prefer single-player RPGs.

Pubbies are terrible in every team-based game, be it Overwatch or Counterstrike or WoW or World of Tanks or Vermintide or Payday or any 2v2 or 4v4 RTS.
So don’t play with pubbies. It really is that simple. Get friends or join a guild, play with them. You know, as a team.

Of course, that requires an ability to make friends.

I have friends but they are all playing something else usually. Playing with pubbies (or pugs or randoms or whatever you choose to call 'em) isn’t 100% recipe for failure either, but it does depend a lot on both the player base and how the game itself works, how hard the content is and how bad failure is for the group. I’ve done a lot of pugging beginning from the EQ1 era 15 years ago, had a lot of fun with the occasional complete fail along the way.

Oh wait, this is the pit. Am I being too mellow about all this?

The appeal is psychology, specifically the ease it makes blaming teammates for anything and everything. All victories are your personal prowess and all defeats are because those noobs over there picked the wrong character.

The appeal is in not spending time hunting around for five other people you know and committing to more of the game than you often want to play at any given sitting.

I have to say the Overwatch randoms I’ve joined up with in public servers have usually been pretty decent - it’s definitely got the least toxic of any Online FPS community I’ve been involved with.

Also, Ana and Hanzo are actually pretty good in the right hands, even though they’re technically snipers.

Fun fact: One of the senior devs has said publically (albeit jokingly) that the penalty for playing as a sniper in Overwatch was the end-of-round screen saying “DEFEAT” :smiley:

this is why I don’t do any online gaming. I tried, but after the fifth time of being smeared by some foul-mouthed 12-year-old I said to hell with it.

I used to be a sniper like you, but then I took a longbow to the knee.

Hey, you wanna play Ana, more power to you. She’s amazing. But she’s also not really a “sniper” in the classical sense. She can throw down massive burst healing.

I endorse this pitting, with two caveats:

Winston is a damn dirty ape. In the right hands, he’s filthy.

Also, my damn team needs to get on the damn point! Snipers are the worst about it (naturally), but if nobody gets on the point, we can’t cap it.

I love Overwatch, I probably have about 100hrs into it, and one of the very first things I did was turn down the chat volume to zero. It upped my fun factor immensely. Otherwise every game, even the competitive, inevitably has noisy breathers, obnoxious bossy leaders, crackly mics, or 10 year olds loudly eating potato chips.

I only turn the mics on in the rare cases when I’m on socially with friends.

Oh, the pit. Hanzo sucks, nothing pisses me off more than Hanzos spam-sniping lucky-ass shots everywhere. Except maybe McCree stuns…yeah, make that McCree stuns suck the most.

Rantiness aside, I think this thread will be more at home in the Game Room.